How come the world has a communications infrastructure that the United States - its most prosperous and influential nation and a leader in every other technology market - can't enjoy? How is it that next year will see a flood of new devices that most Americans won't see, let alone be able to use. And how is it, quite simply, that I can send and receive text from friends in almost every other country in the world, without worrying what equipment they're using, but I can't text my room-mate ten yards away?

The Playmate of the Month is coming to a mobile handset near you Real Soon Now. No, really. Finnish value added services (that's what they claim, anyway) company Wireless Entertainment Services has struck a deal with Playboy.com to offer downloadable playmates and other Playboy related content and general stuff.

Western Digital is buying up some of Fujitsu hard drive ops. It is taking on 1,100 Fujitsu employees based in Thailand and some of the production facilities. Terms are otherwise undisclosed, but considering the commitments, WD is taking on, the price will be low, low, low.

Porn site billing processor CCBill has somehow managed to leak the server passwords of well over a thousand of its clients, whose systems have since been infected by IRC bots listening on port 9872 for whatever commands their owner wishes to issue.

A trio of flaws in the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) service, which allows for automatic hardware detection in a network environment, can offer up total ownership of your machine to a malicious third party, Microsoft warns.